Ron Rash - Serena

"What news today, Pemberton?" Serena said.

"Nothing much, other than Harris calling," Pemberton replied. "It turns out that the Cecils weren't the ones backing Webb and Kephart on the Jackson County tract."

"How did Harris find that out?"

"He wheedled it out of the Cecils' banker in Asheville. But Harris still swears he'll find out who did back them."

"I don't think anyone was backing them," Serena said. "I think that it was all a ruse to get Harris interested in that tract instead of Townsend's. And it worked."

REPAIRS ON THE CABIN WERE NEEDED, THINGS that should have been done during the first warm days of spring, but Rachel had been so worn down by her camp work and caring for Jacob that she'd put it off for months. When she'd flipped the Black Draught calendar in the kitchen to June, Rachel knew the repairs could wait no longer, so the following Sunday she and Jacob didn't walk down to Waynesville and take the train to the camp. Instead, she put Jacob in the smock Widow Jenkins had sewn from overalls Rachel had taken from her father's chest of drawers. Then she dressed herself in her raggiest gingham dress.

Rachel set Jacob on the grass with the toy train engine Joel had given him for a Christmas present. She leaned the Indian ladder against the cabin. Cowhide knotted the rungs to the two locust poles, and the dried leather lashing creaked with each upward step. Once on the roof, Rachel searched for what her father had taught her to look for. On the gable end, where last winter's afternoon sun had melted the nighttime freeze, the sill showed signs of early rot. She took up the broad axe and balanced its weight in her hands.

Rachel carefully lifted the axe to hew the wide new sill, setting her feet as solidly as she could. The axe was heavy and became heavier with each stroke. Her muscles would ache come morning. After ten minutes she knelt to rest and caught sight of the gable's half-dovetail notching, the precision of it. Her father had made this cabin with care, even where he'd placed it, searching until he'd found a lean slab of granite for a hearthstone and a pasture spring that wouldn't go dry, what older folks called lasting water. Building the cabin itself with white oak logs and cedar shingles. What she'd liked best was that her father chose the west slope, the sun late arriving but holding its light longer into the day and early evening.

Rachel picked up the axe again. Her arms were leaden and watery blisters ridged her palms. She thought of how nice it would be if she was at church, not only because of the fellowship and how Preacher Bolick's words were a comfort but just the easefulness of sitting there, not having to do anything but hold Jacob, sometimes not even that because Widow Jenkins would always set him on her lap part of the service. Seven more days before I get that again, she thought.

Rachel did not stop until the hewing was done, then climbed down the ladder and sat beside Jacob. She studied the cabin as the sun finally made its way above the eastern ridgeline, sipping up the morning's last shadows. The chinking was fractured in places, slivers of light passing through a few. Which was no surprise but just part of a cabin settling and a long winter of freezing and thawing. Rachel went to the woodshed and found the trowels and a feed bucket. She gathered old horse droppings and then mud from a boggy seep below the spring, mixed it to the consistency of cornbread batter, the same lumps and heaviness. She handed one of the trowels to Jacob.

"There may come a time you need to know how to do this," she told the child. "So watch me."

Rachel dipped the trowel in the bucket and plopped several scoops onto a plank of wood. Holding the plank in her left hand, Rachel smoothed a gob of the chinking between the logs as she might apply a salve.

"Let's let you do it now."

She molded her hand around Jacob's, helped him dip the trowel into the bucket and balance a clump on the blade's flat end.

"Daub it on good," Rachel said, and led his hand to a gap between two logs.

After a while it was noon-dinner time, so Rachel stopped and went inside. She made Jacob a mush out of milk and cornbread. She ate a piece of cornbread but drank water herself. Milk always made cornbread taste better, and Rachel hoped by next spring she'd have money enough to buy a calf and have all the milk she and Jacob could drink. It seemed possible, because the coffee can on the pantry's upper shelf was slowly filling, mainly with quarters and dimes and nickels but a few dollar bills. Eight Mason jars of honey now stocked the pantry shelves as well, half of which she'd sell to Mr. Scott.

When Jacob finished eating, they went back outside. Rachel placed Jacob in the thin shadow next to the cabin and mounted the ladder to chink the highest logs. She checked occasionally to the west for rain clouds, because changes in humidity would mottle the work. All the while Jacob below her, contentedly daubing logs more than gaps. A woodcock burbled in the woods behind the cabin, and a flock of goldfinches passed overhead soon after, confirmation that full summer had almost come.

An hour passed and Jacob's swaddlings were surely wet, but he wasn't fussing, so Rachel decided to go ahead and repair the chimney. Blustery winter winds had displaced four of the flat field stones. One lay shattered near the fence edge. Rachel fetched a cabbage sack from the woodshed and placed it beside the three good stones before walking down the creek to get a fourth. She found one that suited beside a shady pool, the stone's roughness softened by green lichens that peeled away like old paint. Beard-tongue brightened the bank, and Rachel smelled the wintergreen odor of the blooms, the best kind of smell on a warm day because breathing it in seemed to cool you off from the inside out. For a few moments Rachel lingered. She gazed into the pool, seeing first her own reflection, below it tadpoles flowing across the creek's sandy bottom like black tears. The kind of thing you could see as an omen, Rachel knew, but chose instead to see an omen in the blooming beard-tongue that had, like her, survived a hard winter. She picked up the rock and walked back.

Swinging the cabbage sack over her shoulder, Rachel climbed the ladder one handed, leaning her body as she crossed the pitched roof to the chimney. Placing the stones was like solving a wobbly puzzle, finding the one that fit most snug in each of the chimney's cavities. The last stone finally locked into place, and the chimney was again as it once had been.

Rachel did not leave the roof immediately, instead looked westward. She let her eyes cross the horizon toward the higher mountains that rose where North Carolina became Tennessee. She thought of the map in Miss Stephens' classroom, not the time in the fifth grade when Joel had been such a smart aleck but a morning in first grade, just months after her mother had left, when Miss Stephens had stood by the map whose different colors were like patches on a quilt. The first state they'd learned was North Carolina, long and narrow like an anvil, everything within its lines green. And that had made sense to Rachel at six, because come winter there were still holly bushes and firs and rhododendron, even in the gray trees bright-green clumps of mistletoe. But when Miss Stephens showed them Tennessee, the red hadn't seemed right. When her father pointed out mountains that were in Tennessee, they'd always been blue. Except at sunset, when the mountains were tinged with red. Maybe that was why, she'd thought as Miss Stephens began pointing out other states.

Rachel gave the chimney a last inspection, then eased down the ladder. Once back on the ground, she picked up Jacob and studied the cabin a few moments.

"That'll get us through another winter," she said, and was about to go inside when she saw Widow Jenkins coming up the road, still dressed in her Sunday finery, a peach basket covered with a dish towel in her gnarled hand.